§110. Seeing and Hearing

The fortunes of Confucianism rose and fell more than once in the empire's first millennium. A new and inventive Confucianism appears in the Song dynasty (960-1279), and it is this that scholars usually refer to as neo­Confucianism.

A prominent quality of ordinary seeing and hearing is the structure of ob­ject and perceiver. This objectivity is not accomplished by sense alone but requires the heart to join inner and outer. “When people say they have know­ledge, it comes from the sensations of the sense organs. Human perception comes from the joining of the inner and the outer.” The anticipation of Kant is as unconscious as the repetition of Mozi, now long forgotten. The difference is that in Mozi and Kant this objectivity is an achievement to be enshrined, while for Zhang it is an obstacle to better knowledge. With knowledge of vir­tuous nature we overcome this debilitating objectivity. This superior know­ledge takes in the continuity, the interpenetration of things, and we become good at responding benevolently to whatever happens.⁸⁹

Such knowing is not continuous with ordinary sense perception and requires a step beyond the senses.

Zhang provides a respectably empirical analysis of experiential know­ledge. It is the inception of all knowledge, its object is the phenomenal world, its method is sense perception, its perfection is acute discrimination, and its limitations are bias and incompleteness. The value of experience depends on what a person makes of it, not on any quality that it has or lacks by its own nature. One can remain enmeshed in sensuality and learn nothing, or enroll sensation in the cultivation of virtue. Perceptual knowledge comes first; wisdom is its sagacious extension and benevolent finality.

A Daoist textual tradition that began as a polemical alternative to the Confucians (or Ru, as they would have said) has by the Song dynasty been absorbed into a philosophically more comprehensive neo-Confucianism. The argument of the Dao de jing and the Huainanzi is that the senses are useless, even debilitating, apart from something that is formless, not just an­other body, nothing to see or hear in the ordinary way. The Song dynasty lit­erati give this argument an inflection that makes it authentically Confucian. They worry that if people are preoccupied with ordinary perception they become oblivious to anything subtler. Experience is good, external things should be seen and heard, but inner things, the heart, must not be neglected. The Dao de jing, Zhuangzi, and Huainanzi all criticize this idea as hopeless.

Confucians disallow that emptiness for a philosophy of graduated pleni­tude. Early in the tradition, Mencius contributed the thought that the heart is seeded with virtue and needs only attentive cultivation to bring these seeds to fruition. Sagacity requires not emptiness but disciplined practice, from which benevolent humanity and commanding charisma are expected to arise. Shen Kuo, writing in the eleventh century and citing Mencius, says, “The ears and eyes can receive but cannot select. ‘What selects is the mind. Thus when one thing acts on another, all it does is to attract it.' The mind is different: it accepts what is right and refuses what is wrong. This is why it is called great. To follow the senses and enslave the mind is the way of the small man.”⁹²

He cites Mencius rather than Dao de jing, for it is to the thinking, feeling heart that these Confucians appeal to regulate the senses, rather than as­piring to pivot with the dao. “When the senses of hearing and seeing are used without thought, they are obscured by things. When one thing comes into contact with another, the senses are led astray. The function of the mind is to think. By thinking the mind apprehends; in not thinking, it does not ap­prehend. This is what heaven has granted to us. If we first uphold the no­bler part of our nature, the inferior part will not be able to overcome it.” This was exactly Xunzi's argument more than a thousand years earlier, when he described the heart as the lord provided by heaven to regulate the senses.⁹³

Zhu Xi, a leader of Song dynasty neo-Confucianism, warmly repudiates any idea of a distinct “sensory knowing.” “There is only one kind of knowing! The only issue is whether it is genuine or not.

A Ming dynasty Confucian exhorts students to study books and to study their own heart but not to lose time over “what they see and hear” They must overcome the “fragmented functioning of the senses” and cultivate an in­ward, reflective kind of knowing. Another of these neo-Confucians says, “If a superior person wishes to seek the centeredness common to all, he must get the taste of it through being cautious over what is unseen and apprehen­sive over what is unheard. This is the basis for knowing centeredness. If one cannot hold to this method... it is as if one were to eat and drink all day yet never know the taste. Oh, the taste of it! You will know it when you have be­come thoroughly immersed and drenched in what is unseen and unheard”⁹⁵